The story takes place in and around the forest and lake country of Minnesota. The time is an imagined near-future, just prior to and after a largescale nuclear exchange.

Although the author has set his story within a framework of familiar geography and culture, very little of the manmade world intrudes. Only the airplane which carries a woman and her two daughters to temporary safety in the wolves' territory, and a few later glimpses of obscenely charred and twisted cars and buildings, appear as relics of our technological society. In the third chapter, the surviving wolves and people come upon some barns and abandoned farmhouses, the reminders of a more basic way of human life. The rest of the setting and story takes place in deep wilderness, almost unmarked by human presence.

For while the opening pages sing with the secrets of nature, letting us run with the...